OREANDA-NEWS. The Yokohama Rubber Co., Ltd., announced that it would start building a new plant for Yokohama Tire Manufacturing (Thailand) Co., Ltd. (YTMT) as the Phase-II expansion of its truck/bus (TB) tire production capacity in this July.

Yokohama Rubber plans to build the new plant on an already-acquired land adjacent to an existing TB tire plant of the YTMT. Yokohama Rubber invests a total of 8 billion yen to build the second plant with a building area of 2.6 hectares. With the expansion, Yokohama Rubber will increase TB tire production capacity of the subsidiary from 350,000 to 700,000 tires a year. The second plant will start manufacturing operation in April 2015 and full-fledged operation in December of the same year.

Established in January 2004 in Rayong Province, Thailand, the YTMT started manufacturing TB tires in April 2005. The YTMT is exporting the tires mainly to the North American and European markets for replacement tires. Yokohama Rubber plans to increase sales of TB tires globally and has therefore decided to expand the capacity of the YTMT to speedily follow the sales increase.

The YTMT is a general tire manufacturer and has another plant for manufacturing passenger car and light truck (PC/LT) tires on the same premises. The PC/LT tire plant started operation in November 2006 at a production capacity of 1.4 million tires a year. After performing Phase-III expansions, the annual production capacity of the plant now stands at 4 million tires.